Designed by Russian design firm Art. Lebedev Studio, the Razmetkus is a design concept for an intelligent road marking system.

Razmetkus is an interactive highway system with smart surfaces that act as a display, providing drivers with updated information about the traffic situation and alerting them to whatever hazards that may come up on the road. The interactive system also displays instantly-changing road signs and road markings to help drivers navigate through roads safely and securely.

The highway system consists of interactive road pavement and sensors that track the position of all road users — enabling the system to display information specific to individual drivers.

The design studio created animations to demonstrate how the concept system would help drivers on the road.

In one of the animations, the interactive road system starts to display a yellow two-headed arrow indicating the distance between the user’s car and the car in front of it. As the user approaches the car in front of it, the arrow grows shorter and starts changing its color to red — indicating the imminent danger of collision.

In another animation, the interactive highway system is shown displaying the recommended speed for a particular stretch of road. The recommended speed is displayed on the road in front of the user.

Other images show how the Razmetkus interactive highway system can provide drivers with an overall view of the traffic situation, and let drivers know of detours they can take when they find themselves stuck in a traffic jam.

Art. Lebedev Studio was founded in 1995 and is a private company that offers advanced industrial, graphic, web, and interface design. The studio is known for some of its interesting concepts like its tear-off cardboard USB flash drives and its compact keyboard with keys that can display any image and can be assigned any function.

The last few months have seen sci-fi thinking applied to the most pedestrian of designs: pavement. To replace streetlights, the Netherlands is testing glow-in-the-dark highways painted with a “photo-luminizing” powder that charges during the day and glows a Tron-like green at night (though apparently not in the rain). Meanwhile, an Idaho couple has raised over $2 million on Indiegogo for their almost certainly quixotic dream to turn every blacktop in America into agiant solar cell.

As long as we’re thinking about impractical, expensive, but incredibly appealing ideas, consider this: a highway with smart surfaces that act as an interactive display, updating drivers on traffic ahead, alerting them to sudden hazards, and instantly changing road signs. That’s a new proposal from Art. Lebedev Studio, a Russian design firm known for its clever conceptualizing.

Before you start reaching for your wallet, keep in mind that Art. Lebedev is part design studio, part skunkworks. It does not build roads, and it offers few details and no proof of concept here. It’s just an intriguing idea. But the firm did manage to produce a very real OLED keyboard, yours for a mere $1,500, whose keys will display any symbols you want. And with just a few tens of billions of dollars in crowdfunding, an interactive highway could be a reality too. Or we could just spend the money on public transportation.